The French have another secret to staying thin, one the authorities there don't want you to know about.

Smoking.

It may be true that most Frenchmen don't smoke, but those who do more than make up for it. You can't smoke indoors anymore, and they don't. But if you try to sit in a cafe, or just walk down the street, well if you're sensitive it's a gauntlet.

I am sensitive to tobacco smoke, and in Atlanta I'm able to avoid it, because the outdoor cafes are isolated in the center of town and I hold my breath when I pass smokers by.

You can't do that in Paris. The streets are paved with tobacco smoke. With smoking disallowed inside it all goes outside. Most streets are narrow one-way passages – you can't hold your breath that long. We actually passed workers installing new electrical line on the Champs Ellysee, and I swear the guy pulling the heaviest load had a cigarette in his mouth.

Nicotine is a drug, a highly addictive drug, and the dirty secret of America's health system is we don't address its “positive aspects.”

Smoking dulls the senses. It makes you feel wide-awake and relaxed, all at once. You lose much of your sense of taste and smell – what Parisien smokers taste at dinner is mostly texture.

Smoking burns you up from the inside, but while the fire lives it's a heat you can rely on. The calories you get can burn away in the flames, and you're not especially anxious to add more.

This is why long-time smokers, like author (and now TV star) Anthony Bourdain stay so thin while they're smoking, and gain 20 pounds or more after they quit. This is the real picture of Dorian Gray, and when you finally put the cigarette down is where the years come on.

When I was a kid, we had some of the earliest, classic anti-smoking announcements. Bill Talman from Perry Mason. Yul Brynner. They looked straight at the camera and told us. I'm dying. I have cancer. Don't start.

Yet millions of kids do, because smoking does help keep you thin, and it feels so good. After just three days in Paris I was feeling the effects. I didn't get tired in the afternoon, couldn't get to sleep at night. I was feeling wired, as when I'd done a week-long cruise among smokers in the 1990s.

I was happy to get away. But be warned. There is a devil behind many Parisiens' thin bodies. It comes in a paper tube, and you light the end of it. Then you inhale.

Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist since 1978, and has covered technology since 1982. He launched the Interactive Age Daily, the first daily coverage of the Internet to launch with a magazine, in September 1994.

Disclosure

Dana Blankenhorn has been a journalist, writer and part-time futurist for over 30 years.
At the present moment I run only a personal blog in addition to my ZDNet open source blog.
DanaBlankenhorn.Com has the subtitle The War Against Oil. In the past I have used it to write about political history, e-commerce, personal matters, some ideas related to open source, and The World of Always On, which is the idea of using sensors, motes and RFID to turn WiFi links into platforms for applications which live in the air.
My IRA account at Schwab holds a few tech shares, most notably some Intel and Applied Materials, but there are no open source companies in it. I don’t even own any CBS stock.